The Room That Recalibrated: How Ritin Agarwal Saw the Consulting Shift Before It Had a Name

There is a moment that every consultant eventually recognizes, even if they cannot name it when it happens.

A quarterly review. A mid-market client. The usual sequence: walk through the financials, present the analysis, discuss next steps. Except this time, the client’s internal team had already run the analysis. An AI tool had produced cleaner outputs in twenty minutes than what traditionally required a full week of billable hours.

The room recalibrated in a way everyone could feel. Nobody said anything. Nobody needed to.

Ritin Agarwal, founder of Fundvice and author of The Augmented Advisor: Orchestrate AI and Human Judgement to Dominate the New Consulting Era, describes that moment as the inflection point that already found every consultant, whether they noticed it or not. The overnight analyst effort got replaced by a prompt. The forty-slide deck that once anchored a six-figure engagement started feeling like it belonged to a different era entirely.

What followed was not panic. For Ritin, it was clarity.

The ground has shifted and most advisors are still standing on the old map:

For decades, consulting ran on a rhythm that felt permanent. Clients hired advisors because they held knowledge that was hard to access, expensive to build internally, and time-consuming to apply. Research, analysis, frameworks, presentations, implementation: the whole value chain rested on a simple truth. The consultant knew things the client did not. That asymmetry justified the fee every time.

That asymmetry is closing faster than most people want to acknowledge.

• A founder preparing for a fundraise can now generate a financial model, benchmark competitors, draft a pitch deck, and simulate investor questions all before breakfast
• A CFO can run scenario analyses using tools that did not exist eighteen months ago
• A mid-market CEO can access frameworks that were once locked inside premium consulting firms

The information advantage that shaped this industry now reaches far beyond the consultant alone. And that changes who gets hired, why they get hired, and what they are expected to deliver.

What Ritin observed as the pattern that separates those growing fastest from those standing still:

He is direct about this in the opening pages of The Augmented Advisor. The professionals growing fastest right now did not get lucky. They saw something clearly and moved on it. They recognised that when AI absorbs the routine layers of consulting, the role moves more deeply into the territory where human contribution has always carried the most weight.

As the tools became smarter, the consultant’s role became more human.

That tension between more capable tools and more demanding clients is real. And the opportunity inside it is enormous. Once that becomes clear, the profession stops looking like it did before, and the advisor’s role comes into sharper focus.

Why Ritin is uniquely positioned to make this argument:

The Augmented Advisor is not a framework developed in theory. It is the result of running a consulting firm through the disruption it describes. With close to a decade of experience as a financial process consultant across M&A, cost optimization running into hundreds of millions, and building advisory firms from scratch, Ritin has worked across the full arc of business decisions: cash flow pressures, capital deployment, operational restructuring, and investor-facing reporting across PE-backed businesses, founder-led companies, and finance leaders navigating meaningful change.

What makes his perspective distinctive is that he is not observing the AI shift from a distance. He has built it into his own practice. Developing AI-native workflows for finance functions. Deploying agentic tooling in live client engagements. Rebuilding the entire operating model of Fundvice around the thesis this book explores.

His core argument emerges directly from that experience: AI compresses the information and analytical layers of advisory work while concentrating premium value in human judgment, trust, and niche expertise. It is a practitioner’s thesis, tested in real engagements, shaped by real client relationships, and written with the Indian advisory market in clear view while remaining relevant to consultants navigating this shift anywhere in the world.

What the book is structured to deliver:

The Augmented Advisor moves across four parts. The New Landscape covers how AI rewrote the consulting playbook, what today’s buyers now expect, and what the augmented consultant’s most powerful role looks like. Redesigning Your Practice covers niche specialization, AI-native offer design, building the right tool stack, and AI-enhanced delivery. Delivering and Earning covers outcome-based pricing and building trust as a compounding asset. Scaling and Leading covers building the AI-first firm, turning expertise into scalable products, and thought leadership that attracts the right clients before any conversation begins.

It is written for professionals who can already sense this change and want to meet it with clarity, relevance, and intent. For those who want to build practices, offerings, and careers that grow stronger in a world where technology is transforming every industry.

As Ritin writes in the preface: “The strongest advisors of the coming era will be the ones who combine intelligent technology with human depth and use that combination to create outcomes that truly matter.”

The Augmented Advisor is available on Amazon, Flipkart, Kindle, and Google Books.

Buy now and begin building the practice that this era is asking for.

Grab Your Copy Now: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B0GYK78MGL